Philokalia - holybooks.com

1 [V1] 11 Introduction to the Philokalia Volume 1 The Philokalia is a collection of texts written between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries by spiritual masters of the Orthodox Christian tradition. It was compiled in the eighteenth century by two Greek monks, St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain of Athos (1749-1809) and St Makarios of Corinth (1731-1805), and was first published at Venice in 1782. A second edition was published at Athens in 1893, and this included certain additional texts on prayer by Patriarch Kallistos not found in the 1782 edition.

2 A third edition, in five volumes, was also published at Athens during the years 1957-1963 by the Astir Publishing Company. It is on the Astir edition that our English translation is based. Thus our translation, which we likewise hope to publish in five volumes, will reproduce all the texts included in the three Greek editions. We depart notably from these editions in but four respects. First, we have not included the introduction written by St Nikodimos, and we have rewritten the notes which he placed before each text or series of texts written by a single author.

3 Second, we have used a more reliable version of a text if one is now available. Where that has been the case, we signify it in the relevant introductory note. Third, we have attributed to Evagrios the work On Prayer, which in the Greek editions is attributed to St Neilos; the explanation for this change of attribution is in the note preceding Evagrios' texts. Fourth, we have placed in an appendix the text, attributed to St Antony the Great, which opens the Greek editions; the reasons for this decision are likewise stated in the note introducing that text.

4 Where certain passages, or indeed entire sections, of individual texts attributed by St Nikodimos to particular authors are now known or suspected to have been written by other hands, we have [V1] 12 Introduction to the Philokalia Volume 1 indicated this either in the introductory notes to the texts in question or in footnotes. But in no case have we excised PhilokaliaDownloaded from Visit the site for more books on the topic. any such passage or section on the grounds that it is not by the author to whom St Nikodimos has attributed it.

5 The distinction between genuine and spurious where all these writings are concerned must rest, not on the correctness of the attribution of their authorship, but on whether or not they belong to the spiritual tradition which the collection as a whole represents. All the texts in the original Philokalia are in Greek, and all except two were first written in Greek, and even these two (written originally in Latin) were translated into Greek in Byzantine times. But the influence of the work has by no means been confined to the Greek-speaking world.

6 It was Paisii Velichkovskii (1722-1794), a Russian monk who visited Mount Athos and later settled in Moldavia, who first translated a selection of the texts into Slavonic, published, with the title Dobrotolublye, at Moscow in 1793 and reprinted at Moscow in 1822. This was the translation carried by the pilgrim in The Way of a Pilgrim; and indeed the impact of the Philokalia on Russian spirituality and culture in the nineteenth century was immense, as the writings of Dostoievsky, an assiduous reader of the book, alone sufficiently testify.

7 A translation into Russian was made by Ignatii Brianchaninov (1807-1867) and was published in 18^7. Yet another Russian translation, still with the title Dobrotolubiye, was made by Bishop Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894), who included in it several texts not in the original Greek edition, and deliberately omitted or paraphrased certain passages in some of the texts of the Greek edition. Bishop Theophan's translation was published at Moscow in five volumes at the expense of the Russian Monastery of St Panteleimon on Mount Athos.

8 The first volume of the series, originally issued in 1877, was reprinted in 1883, 1885, 1905 and 1913. A photographic reprint of the 1883 edition was begun by the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, Jordanville, , in 1963. A Romanian translation, which also includes additional material, began to appear in 1946 under the editorship of Father Dumitru Staniloae; in 1976 the fifth volume of this edition appeared, and it is planned to complete it in eight volumes. A full French translation is in progress.

9 Both the Romanian and the Flinch translations are based on the original Greek. The only previous translation into English of texts from the [V1] 13 Introduction to the Philokalia Volume 1 Philokalia is that made by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer in two volumes with the titles Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart and Early Fathers from the Philokalia1 published in 1951 and 1954 respectively. This translation was made, not from the Greek original, but from Theophan's Russian translation, and covers slightly less than a third of the material of the Greek edition.

10 It was because of this that the translators wrote in their Introduction to the second of these two English volumes that the only final solution to the problem of making the treasures contained in the Philokalia available to the West in a form as rich and as wisely balanced as the original is for someone with the necessary qualities .. to undertake to translate the whole of the original Greek itself. We can only hope that this work will one day be achieved; it might well be one of the greatest single contributions to perpetuating in the West what is highest in the Christian tradition.